Mozillafoundation

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 19. I spent almost all of my time working on internal projects and projects not yet ready for public announcement; some of these will be announced soon. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 12. Last week we had a Foundation board meeting, and we’re working on some internal (for now) initiatives coming out of that. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 5. As with last week, I spent a lot of the week preparing for an upcoming board meeting and working on other internal projects; some of these will be announced in due time. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending September 21. I spent a lot of the week handling internal administrivia. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Legal/IP issues I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement. Grants and related activities Alexander Surkov completed the second milestone on his implementation in Mozilla of the IAccessible2 accessibility API for Windows (to be used by future versions of Firefox and Firefox-compatible screen readers on Windows). The IA2ToGecko project page has more information, including links to the relevant bugs. Ariel Rios completed the second milestone on his project to implement a new Collection interface for the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility API (to be used by future versions of Firefox and Firefox-compatible screen readers on Linux). For more information (and to track progress) see GNOME bug 326516. Steve Lee completed the final milestone for his project to create a prototype switch-activated on-screen keyboard for Firefox; he’ll be showing this at the Mozilla accessibility summit. Web sites David continued work on getting old www.mozilla.org content archived. Upcoming activities I’m considering attending the Mozilla accessibility summit on October 5 in Boston. I’m also considering attending one or both days of the Seneca College Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS 2007) in Toronto on October 25 and 26.

For some time now the Mozilla Foundation has been involved in supporting efforts to make Firefox and other Mozilla products more accessible to people with disabilities; see for example my blog post on Mozilla and accessibility. This document builds on the ideas in that post to propose an overall vision and strategy for possible efforts to improve the accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-related software and the web in general. Note that the ideas expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Mozilla Foundation. It’s up to the Foundation board and to the new executive director to decide whether and how to implement this proposed strategy. Also note that my comments are primarily concerning the Mozilla Foundation; however the Mozilla Corporation has also taken some great steps to support accessibility (for example, hiring Tim Keenan to work full-time on accessibility QA and evangelism) and no doubt will do more in future. ...

I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. Inspired by Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind, I want to take a broader view and present my thoughts on why accessibility is important for the Mozilla project, the role that Mozilla and Firefox might play in the world of assistive technology (AT) as it evolves, and what the Mozilla Foundation might do to help this process along. ...

Last week on behalf of the Mozilla Foundation I attended the 21st Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, sponsored by the Center on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge, better known to all and sundry as the CSUN 2006 conference or just plain “CSUN”. The CSUN conference is the premier conference for people interested in the topic of software accessibility and “assistive technologies” in general. This was the first year that the Mozilla project had a formal presence at the conference, and it turned out to be a “coming out party” for the Mozilla project’s accessibility activities in general and for accessibility support in Firefox in particular. This post provides an in-depth report on our CSUN experience. ...